The Hard Drive (HDD) PS4 Guide

There’re are lots of rumors around on how to upgrade/replace the factory hard drive of PS4. While some users find it a very easy process to carry out due to their good technical knowledge, most users are not savvy enough to take such a step without a guide with a detailed and outlined instructions.

Appropriate PS4 hard drive upgrade

The next round in the console wars has begun. When the competing consoles were first released, we gave the edge to the PS4 over the Xbox One. Finding an appropriate hard drive for upgrading PS4 storage capacity in order to store the desired data internally, such as movies and games, is not a hard job eventually. We often get asked why we don’t buy more WDC and Toshiba drives. Coming off a series of stinging losses to the Xbox 360, including an exorbitant $599 launch price tag, lack of exclusives compared to the Xbox 360 and a subpar member subscription service, Sony is turning the page with the PlayStation 4. And at this point in time, the PS4 is still looking good.

Types of hard drives for PS4

The short answer is that we’ve tried. Priced at a competitive $399, the PS4 shows that Sony has been listening to its users, overhauling the controllers, improving the interface and embracing social — all in attempt to win back the fanbase it lost in 2006. Bear in mind that the best PS4 hard drive can be more than just a mechanical hard drive without any addition. It continues to improve thanks to regular system firmware updates and a consistent stream of console-exclusive independent games. These days we need to purchase drives in reasonably large quantities, 5,000 to 10,000 at a time. But does the PS4 do enough to win us over–and just how much better are the games?

Make sure of the compatibility

Exclusive AAA-titles are less frequent, but the PS4 has some promising titles coming down the pike, including The Last Guardian and Horizon Zero Dawn, both scheduled to arrive in 2016. We do this to keep the unit cost down and so we can reliably forecast our drive cost into the future. Several functions of the PS4 were not yet available to test as of the time of this writing, including video capture and live-streaming video. You’ll need then to make sure that the hard drive you’ve chosen is compatible with PS4 and fits into its drive cage. But if you’re concentrating more on the exclusives 2015 has to offer, the Xbox One wins that immediate holiday battle. For Toshiba we have not been able to find their drives in sufficient quantities at a reasonable price.

Hard drive performance

We will update this review once we can fully access the PlayStation Network from this console. The majority of games are available on both platforms and PC. For WDC, we sometimes get offered a good price for the quantities we need, but before the deal gets done something goes sideways and the deal doesn’t happen. The PlayStation 4 is one of the sexiest parallelograms we’ve had the pleasure of setting eyes on. We call these multi-platform games. A High performance gaming hard drives can be a good solution for expanding the limited storage of PS4, but you’ll need then an additional equipment for this purpose.

This has happened to us multiple times, as recently as last month. We love the modern abstract design of the slanted box. In our testing, we’ve found that a handful of titles perform better on a PlayStation 4. We would be happy to buy more drives from Toshiba and WDC, if we could, until then we’ll continue to buy our drives from Seagate and HGST. It lends the device some showpiece status without taking away from the rest of your living room’s decor.

How long is the lifespan

The most recent example of this is Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Another question that comes up is why the bulk of the drives we buy are 4TB versus the 5-, 6-, 8- and 10TB drives now on the market. Weighing 6.1 pounds and measuring 10.8 x 12 x 2.08 inches, it’s more compact than the 7 pound, 13.1 x 10.8 x 3.1-inch Xbox One. To be clear: The PS4 and the Xbox One are very closely matched. Usually, any mainstream hard drive will last more than 3 years without any issue at all, unless it’s used under heavy workload like that found in workstations, then this is supposed to cut down on the age of the drive. The primary reason is that the price/TB for the larger drives is still too high, even when considering storage density.

Should the HDD be speedy?

The console is split into four panels: one made of glossy, fingerprint-prone, black plastic on top with the remaining three made with textured black matte plastic. Both offer a growing library of third-party games — mainstays like the Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed series, as well as newer titles like Fallout 4 and Rainbow Six Siege. It doesn’t make since to pick the fastest hard drive on the market to just inject it inside PS4. Another reason is availability of larger quantities of drives. Towards the rear of the top is a small gray PlayStation emblem. And both double as full-service entertainment systems, with built-in Blu-ray players and streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu Plus.

Spindle Speed Rate

To fill a Backblaze Vault built from 20 Storage Pod 6.0 servers, we need 1,200 hard drives. Along the front of the device sit the Sony and PS4 logos in the left and right corners, respectively. At this stage in the game we’re still partial to the PlayStation 4. We are filling 3+Backblaze Vaults a month, but the larger size drives are hard to find in quantity. The two halves are separated by a slim, horizontal LED strip that changes color depending on the status of the device. Going for 7200 RPM hard drive is tempting, but you’ll not find a 2.5″ form factor with that speed unless it’s 1TB or less.

Along with a few caveats about areas where the PS4 can improve. In short, 4TB drives are readily available at the right price, with 6- and 8TB drives getting close on price, but still limited in the quantities we need. The light glows blue, for example, when the console is warming up and white when its ready to play. No matter how you purchase a PlayStation 4, it’ll ship with an HDMI cable, a DualShock 4 wireless controller, a USB charging cable and an earbud headset for game chat. We publish the hard drive stats data on our website with the Q1 2016 results there as well.

Backup PS4 User’s Data

The power and eject buttons are located on the front of the device, but since they’ve been made to mimic the LED strip, it took us a few seconds to realize that these tiny glossy strips were anything other than decoration. Before replacing PS4 hard drive you should consider first to backup the operating system with the data it includes, involving game installs, game saves and, if you wish, the movies you downloaded. The standard console goes for $350 though it seems like at almost any given time a PS4 bundle is being offered by Sony or another retailer. Over the years thousands of people have downloaded the files. The optical drive slot sits between the two buttons. After a recent $50 price cut, the PS4 and Xbox One are nearly identically priced.

One of the folks who downloaded the data was Ross Lazarus, a self-described grumpy computational biologist. The slot is a little hard to see, thanks to the all-black motif. PS4 bundles usually provide the best overall value if you’re looking to get started from scratch. He analyzed the data using Kaplan-Meier statistics and plots, a technique typically used for survivability analysis. The console’s rear is loaded with ports and fan vents to help the components stay cool.

Going for PS4 HDD upgrade kits

Some franchise titles get exclusive PS4 consoles included in their bundles, most recently seen with the Star Wars: Battlefront PS4 SKU. His charts and analysis present a different way to look at the data and we appreciate Mr. While the PS4’s designers intended for the console to lay horizontally, there is an optional $14 vertical stand available. The PlayStation ecosystem includes various products with some shared functionality. Lazarus taking the time to put this together. Setup for the PS4 is quick and painless. For example, the PS Vita can stream PS4 games via “remote play” mode. Workload is more important then if your drive runs 24/7. Once we hooked up the console to our 40-inch Samsung television via the included HDMI cord, we plugged in the machine and hit the power button. The PlayStation TV (PSTV) can also stream PS4 games as well as play Vita games and legacy PlayStation titles.

Use an external hard drive

As the data suggests, if you can afford to pay a 50% premium you should buy HGST, preferably Ultrastar if there isn’t a big difference between them and Deskstar class drives, but in all likely hood, even if you run your machine 24/7, your HDD will be spinning idly for about 90% of that time unless you will be using it for a home server and will be accessing it all the time. You’ll find yourself in a situation that you must use an external hard drive during the PS4 storage upgrade process. After the console booted, we followed the helpful prompts to set the language, time zone and Internet connection. (You can use the Ethernet port or Wi-Fi thanks to the built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi radio.) From there, we read through the Terms of Service, hit the agree button and were ready to start playing. Select phones from Sony’s Xperia line can also stream gameplay from the PlayStation 4. Mostly all modern external hard drives are compatible with PS4, so don’t worry about that as long as you have the latest PS4 system software update (currently it’s version 4.01) which gives a good support for external storage additions. Also, the biggest thing I can recommend, if you care about your data, always run a second drive that mirrors the first, because no matter who makes the drives they can all fail. From start to finish, the whole operation took less than five minutes.

More games on the new hard drive

Sony also offers PlayStation Vue, a cable TV alternative starting at $50 a month available on the PS3 and PS4. We’ve absolutely done firmware upgrades in the past. The majority of the PS4 ports reside on the rear of the device. PlayStation Now, the company’s legacy game-streaming service, is available on every PlayStation platform and lets subscribers play games from the Sony vault. Mostly for stability or longevity fixes. Now it’s possible to enjoy more games on your PS4 game console after upgrading the stock hard drive to a larger and probably faster drive.

There’s HDMI-out, Ethernet, an Optical port, an Auxilliary port for the PlayStation Camera and a jack for the power plug. If you purchase in three-month increments, it works out to around $15 a month. If they’re compatibility fixes we don’t typically bother with them since our set-up is so different. A pair of USB 3.0 are on the front of the console. Now PS4 owners can “host” a play session and “hand off” the game controller for up to 60 minutes to one of their friends on the PlayStation Network.

Last Words

For a wide variety of PS4 users, upgrading the stock hard drive to at least 2TB is a mandatory step to carry out. But yes, if we think a firmware update will help us we’ll run some tests and then update the fleet. That’s a fair spread of ports, but the Xbox One has even more: Three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI-in, HDMI-out, Gigabit Ethernet, and Digital Out. At the end of the session players can simply restart. Would it be fair to say that the bottleneck is the amount of data your users want to backup? Sony’s PS3 controllers have undergone a much needed makeover.

Share Play can also work with co-op games that let two players engage at the same time. As I understand it, you have chosen to have 2X servers fill up in 2Y days, instead of x servers in y days? Measuring 6.2 x 2.04 x 3.85-inches, the DualShock 4 controller is slighter smaller than its predecessor, the DualShock 3 (6.3 x 3.82 x 2.17-inches). In a nut shell, you’ just don’t want to run out of space when PS4 hard drive informs you it’s full of Data. However, the DualShock 4 is slightly heavier at 7.4 ounces, compared to 6.7 ounces for the DS3. Share Play works with any PS4 game and only the host player needs a copy of the game and a PlayStation Plus membership. You don’t care how fast they load because you always have many servers accepting new data.